A few Notes about bing maps

Learned

I learned that bing.com is just another Microsoft snafu.

The first time I learned about bing was when I went to do a search on farecast and instead of being redirected to "live.farecast.com" like I'm used to, I ended up at "bing.com/travel". I briefly considered entering my password to check my alerts... but one shouldn't enter one's password into a different domain. Also, there was nothing to tell me that bing.com was a microsoft or anything to tell me that farecast.com hadn't just been hacked and was directing to some spam site. So, I closed the window and planned to try again another day to see if Farecast.com had sorted themselves out.

Later that same day, I learned about the release of bing.com, realized that it wasn't hacked and thought to myself, "Microsoft really isn't very good at this."

Then, last night, I was reading this article pointing out that the bing.com logo is just a stretched out font and thought, "maybe I'll see how terrible this thing actually is."

After searching for a random word ("nonsense" if I recall), I noticed that there was a "maps" link, which I decided to check out. Herein I found several awesomely dumb mistakes:

(1) No clean URLs. Unlike google maps, the maps on bing.com have the totally useless "default.aspx" in the address. Hasn't IIS Mod-Rewrite been around long enough that these shitty URLs should go away?

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

(2) If I click on this interesting "3D" button, I get a message that tells me it's not available in my browser and that I need to "See Help". Microsoft appears to have eschewed one of the more useful aspects of the World Wide Web: linking. Instead, they just tell us to see something.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

(3) After a lot of searching around the page, I finally found the "Help" link in the bottom right corner. Once in the help pop-up window (yes. pop-up window), I do some searches and find that the 3D feature is only supported by Windows XP and, even then, won't work in Chrome or Safari. Once again, Microsoft decides that even if the world wide web runs on open standards, they can still just code for some of them. I will admit it's nice to see Firefox 3.0 in the list of supported browsers as I think it means we're winning the war.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!